'Mrs. Griggs' Returns to the Milwaukee Journal (Sentinel)--Eighty Years After Her Advice Column's Debut, in 1934We never miss the wonderful columnist Jim Stingl of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, especially his human-interest stories, work in the tradition of Ione Quinby Griggs and other greats, such as Bill Janz of the Milwaukee Sentinel and more. If you missed this Jim Stingl column, he writes about the book--in which his other columns on "Mrs. Griggs" also are cited--here. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________

﻿'Mrs. Griggs' Returns to TV﻿*. . . on Monday, June 2, 2014, and again on Monday, June 9, for a two-episode discussion on MPTV's marvelous "I Remember" show. It broadcasts at 6:30 p.m. on Sundays in the Channel 10 viewing area across southeastern Wisconsin, and on Tuesdays at 12:30 a.m. on Channel 36.1. Across the state, "I Remember" also is rebroadcast on the Wisconsin Channel; check local cable listings. And if you missed the recent, related "I Remember" episode on the "Green Sheet," it now is posted for streaming from the show's website, here, along with many other episodes to enjoy. Our thanks to host Jim Peck, producer Jane Bieterman, and the many MATC staff and students who gave us a great time, again, as they have been doing for two decades of "I Remember."*Yes, Mrs. Griggs was a guest on early tv in Milwaukee -- and she also had her own radio show, briefly, both on the Journal Company's WTMJ. And you can read more about these moments in Milwaukee broadcasting history and more, in the book.________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Oh, my, Mrs. Griggs. She made the Shepherd Express; see Dave Lurhssen's review here. We suspect that she would be pleased._______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Thanks for this fine write-up from "Rick the Librarian" in lovely Western Springs, Illinois, where we returned in fall--after our research trips for years before--for a wonderful opportunity to talk about the book in the hometown of Ione Quinby Griggs. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Click here for how to find more of this preview of Chapter One, published in part as “On the Front Page in the 'Jazz Age': Journalist Ione
Quinby, Chicago's Ageless 'Girl Reporter,’” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 106:1 (Spring 2013), 91-128. “The
discovery has been made as to why I wear a hat,” confessed Ione Quinby, writing
to her readers of the Chicago Evening
Post from the newsroom, where she wrote that her male colleagues had “never
quite figured out” the foibles of the first newswoman in their midst in the
1920s. Famed as the Post’s “girl
reporter,” although she was in her thirties, Quinby wrote that the men “were
never sure about my age.” They also were baffled by her habit of never removing
her hat, whether at her desk in the newsroom or out on assignment in the city’s
streets. As her “unmarcelled bob” customarily was “crowned with a $5 turban,”
she wrote, the men “didn’t know whether my bangs were sewed to my hat or
annexed to my scalp.” Quinby’s behaviors so bemused her editor that he sent her
out on a “stunt story” for free psychoanalysis offered by faculty
“alienists” at nearby Northwestern University. Typically, Quinby took the
assignment in good humor, turning in a light-hearted, self- deprecating story
that won her one of more than a thousand bylines earned by a phenomenon of the
era: a woman journalist reporting on the front page in the “Jazz Age” in Chicago.[i]
Typically,
too, Quinby had persevered to get the story, after the psychology professor
initially rejected her request. He “looked at me kindly but said they were only
taking subjects who had something wrong with them,” she wrote, such as
“children who mis- behave in school” or “persons sent by the police department”
for disorderly conduct. The Post
photographer helpfully protested to the professor on behalf of the men in the
news- room, stating that “you’d better take her,” as “there’s something radically
wrong with her.’” The reporter readily agreed, offering two trappings of her
job as a journalist – her trademark hats and her desk’s placement in the
newsroom–that had become her totems. “I’ve got a lot more nerve when I’ve got
a hat on” in “encounters with people I interview . . . from those who treat me
to sodas to those who try to throw me out the door. I always have on a hat,”
she admitted. “And it upsets me terribly to have my desk moved” from the site
where she made her most “important decisions” amid constant deadlines in the
competition among the city’s press for headlines–and for front-page bylines.[ii]
The
professor, apparently intrigued by a “girl reporter” well known for covering
the so-called “girl-crime beat” of murders and other mayhem in Chicago in the
1920s, agreed to give a glimpse into her psyche. She regaled her readers with
his assessment of her attachment to her ever-present headwear, writing that
“subconsciously, I have made my- self believe” that a hat also helped her to
“reach big decisions,” especially “in desperate situations.” Indeed, compared
to the physical risks of “stunts” and stories that sent women reporters into
the worst of their cities’ streets, an assignment that took her to a campus and
risked only a look into her mind may have been a relief. She shared her
wariness, however, that her sources now would be “mean enough to take advantage
of this discovery” about the quirky Quinby. Her newsroom colleagues also now
would know of the significance that she placed upon the placement of her desk.
“You don’t like to have your desk moved,” the “alienist” advised, as “it
satisfies your ego as the only little girl report- er” among men on the “news
side,” not off to the side with the distaff staff of “women’s pages.” Her story
gave a rare glimpse behind the studied persona that Quinby had carefully
constructed. Owing to her unusual place in the press, she apparently so
intrigued the professor that he pressured her to participate in his study “to
promote social adjustment.” The “girl reporter” retreated, however, upon
realizing that participation required filing a form that would reveal her
best-kept secret: her age.[iii]
Only after her retirement, six decades later–in her mid-nineties–and as she
neared her death, at a hundred years old, would co-workers discover that she
had been a decade older than she had claimed.
By
then, despite her fame in the 1920s, Quinby’s remarkable career would be forgot- ten
in her city. She is noted in only one of many histories of the Chicago press in
the era, and only is noted to mischaracterize her as solely a “sob sister,” a “girl
reporter” on the “girl-crime beat,” covering sordid lives of other women also
deemed better forgotten from the city’s crime-ridden streets and Cook County
jail cells. Instead, as a colleague later would describe her colorful Chicago
career, Quinby was a memorably risk-taking reporter: “She had
seen a man murdered, watched bodies of twenty women and children removed from
an excursion boat hit by a lake storm, attended a gangster wedding, shared a
candy bar with Al Capone,” and had “lent her compact to a woman who wanted to
freshen up a bit after killing her husband with an axe.” A colleague at the
time also called her the city’s foremost “sob sister,” if in admiration of her
status among her cohort of women reporters. However, writes historian Alice
Fahs, “sob sister” became a “false and derogatory term,” too often “used to
stigmatize and stereotype all newspaper
women’s writings” as merely “emotive writing.” A means of subtly attacking women
reporters for “accrued power” and “perceived ‘invasion’ of public spaces”
that previously had been the purview of men, the term was a form of “hidden
politics” by the brethren of the press, who denigrated women journalists’ work as “sob
stuff,” she writes. Decades later, the “sob sister” term remains part of
newsroom parlance. Chicago news man and historian Wayne Klatt writes in his
recent chronicle of Chicago’s press that “nearly every paper in the nation had
a ‘sob sister,’” needed to “introduce emotion to the once-dry news” of
“old-fashioned political sheets,” if the “newsmen may have mocked them” then –
as have some historians of media since. Although the work of women journalists long
has been “hiding in plain sight” in newspaper archives, so-called “sob stuff”
has been “little studied by historians,” Fahs writes. As a result, women
journalists then famed nationwide among their millions of readers “might have
been surprised by their invisibility today,” she writes, in scholarship on
women, media, mass culture, and their cities.[iv]
Quinby
made women her wide-ranging “beat,” with coverage of not only “girl crimi- nals”
but also of many women emerging in the era in politics, business, and other
sectors of urban life in the metropolis of the Midwest. This study argues that
the result of lack of recognition of the range of her reportage–first in
Chicago and throughout her remarkable career–is that more than her own story
has been missed. Also lost from scholarly literature and public memory have
been her stories of the women of Chicago, in more than a thousand contemporary
accounts that comprise a social history of their lives–as well as their
misguided loves–in an era when they and their city had significant roles in a
larger societal transition. Recovering her body of work adds to recent research
on women journalists in urban media, who reached millions of readers in the
era, toward a fuller understanding of “a lost world of women’s writings that
placed women at the heart of a new public life,” as Fahs writes. “Out on
assignment,” they were “urban explorers who crisscrossed cities in search of
their ‘stories,’” the stories of other women still unexplored in scholarship in
urban studies, and especially in the era’s “emerging world of working women” –
other women making news for more than murder and mayhem. “Precisely because
most newspaper women were hired” to write for women readers, as Fahs writes,
their work proved “vital in shaping and disseminating ideas regarding women’s
changing lives” and in creating “public conversations about the cultural
politics of modern life.” In the case of Quinby, her versatility as well as her
ability accounted for her success, which provided her with a platform to
advance opportunities for other women, not only in newsrooms but also in many
workplaces. Her coverage also acted as means of “social control,” at times
countering other messages from media regarding gender roles, and served as
advice for women in coping with momentous societal change in the 1920s, nowhere
more than in the Midwestern metropolis of Chicago.[v]
This
examination of Ione Quinby’s work in her Chicago career, an unusual training
for her next career as an advice columnist, includes quantitative content
analysis of all of her bylined stories in the Evening Post, more than a thousand stories in a dozen years, to
recapture the range of her reportage on many women who made news in the era.[vi]
To suggest the range of her work into other media as well, also noted are some
of hundreds of stories that she retold–and sold–for national syndication in
other newspapers and in crime magazines such as Master Detective, as her byline became known beyond Chicago.
Much of that body of work, like her later book Murder for Love, capitalized on the coun- try’s fascination with her
city in the era, especially her coverage of gangsters’ girlfriends, mobsters’
gun molls, and other women gone wrong or done wrong in Chicago. However, by
also covering women from politicians to circus workers to celebrities, she was
among women journalists of the era who expanded “women’s place” in the news as
well as in newsrooms–and, again, nowhere more than in the newsrooms of
Chicago. . . . [i] Ione Quinby, “This
Tells Why Wearing a Hat Gives You Nerve/Girl Reporter Undergoes Psych[o]analysis
Test at College,” Chicago Evening Post,
January 21, 1926. [ii] Ibid.[iii] Ibid.; Karen Herzog,
“Ione Quinby Griggs Dies; Advised Lovelorn,” Milwaukee Sentinel, August 19, 1991; Jackie Loohauis, “‘Dear Mrs.
Griggs’: A Legend Dies,” Milwaukee
Journal, August 19, 1991. [iv]
Robert W. Wells, The
Milwaukee Journal: An Informal Chronicle of Its First 100 Years (Milwaukee,
Wis.: Milwaukee Journal, 1981), 262; Robert
St. John, This Was My World (Garden
City, N.Y.: Country Life Press, 1953), 36, 158; Alice Fahs, Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the
Making of Modern Public Space (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2011), 2-9, 13-15, 91, 102, emphasis in the original; Wayne Klatt, Chicago Journalism: A History (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2009), 109. On
origins of the term “sob sister,” most sources attribute its first use for
women jour- nalists at a New York City trial in 1907, notably the Wisconsin-born
former Chicagoan Winifred “Annie Laurie” Black Bonfils. For earlier use of the
term for her, see Robert E. Park, “The Natural History of the Newspaper,” American Journal of Sociology 29:3
(November 1923), 287.[v]
Fahs, Out on Assignment, 2-9.[vi]
On methodology for quantitative content analysis for this chapter, the authors
analyzed the Chicago Evening Post
from January 1, 1920, to October 31, 1932, examining each daily edition and
coding each bylined story on front pages and all stories on all pages with the
byline of “Ione Quinby,” for a total of 1,086 stories, then coded for content
in ten categories: business, celebrities, courts, education, fashion, general
features, government, health, police, and politics.

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